DOA4 Recomp

DOA4-recomp

Dead or Alive 4 running natively on PC. Not an emulator: the Xbox 360 game code is statically recompiled into a real Windows program with the ReXGlue SDK, so it runs at your monitor's resolution and refresh rate, in proper widescreen, with modern controllers.

Work in progress, and heavily AI-assisted.

You need your own copy of the game. No game code or data is in this repository and none is downloaded. You supply a dump of your own disc and the included compiler turns it into a playable build on your machine. Your dump and the generated code stay on your disk.

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Getting it running

1. Check you have what you need

• Dead or Alive 4 (USA, Europe) — Revision 1, dumped from your own disc as an .iso. Inside it, default.xex must be exactly 16,465,920 bytes. Other regions and revisions do not work: the function addresses in doa4retail_manifest.toml only match this one build.

• 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 and a GPU that supports Direct3D 12.

• A CPU with AVX2 — any Intel from 2013 (Haswell) or AMD from 2015 onward.

• About 15 GB of free space for the dump, the generated code and the build.

• These build tools: 7-Zip, CMake, Ninja, LLVM/clang, plus the Visual Studio Build Tools with "Desktop development with C++" (clang compiles against Microsoft's headers and libraries, so it needs them even though clang itself comes from LLVM).

  The compiler checks for all of these and offers to install the first four for you with winget. The Build Tools you install yourself, from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/ — it is a multi-gigabyte download, so it is not something to kick off behind your back.

2. Unzip it somewhere sensible

Download DOA4-recomp-win-x64.zip from Releases and unzip it anywhere — with two things to know about the folder you choose:

• Its path must not contain a ^. Windows' own build tools treat it as an escape character and the build fails right at the end, so the compiler checks for it and stops immediately instead of wasting your time.
• If the path contains non-ASCII characters — an accent, as in C:\Users\José\… — FidelityFX cannot be compiled there. The game builds and runs fine; you just lose the CAS and FSR sharpening options. Move the folder to an all-ASCII path if you want them.

Spaces, apostrophes and parentheses are all fine.

3. Build the game

Run compiler.exe (or compiler-tui.exe if you prefer a terminal), point it at your ISO, and press Build. It extracts the disc into game\, translates the game code, and compiles it.

This takes a while — a thousand-odd source files — and the progress bar tracks the real compiler, not a guess. Everything it does is written to compiler.log next to the exe, which is the first place to look if something goes wrong. Running it again reuses the extracted disc and the generated code, so a second build is much quicker.

4. Play

Run DOA4Launcher.exe, pick your settings, press Launch.

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Settings

The launcher keeps its own state in launcher.json and writes the game's settings to doa4retail.toml, leaving any keys it does not manage alone. Hover any setting in the launcher for an explanation of what it does.

Graphics presets — start here. Performance for laptops and older GPUs, Balanced (the default) for most machines, Quality if you have a desktop GPU. Change any individual setting and the preset switches itself to Custom.

Tab	What is in it
Display	Fullscreen, monitor, aspect ratio, letterboxing, frame interpolation, V-Sync. Match my display sets the aspect ratio to your monitor's exact shape for true widescreen.
Graphics	Presets, internal resolution (1x–8x), output scaling (CAS / FSR), MSAA, post anti-aliasing, texture filtering. Per-axis render scales live under Advanced.
Input	Controller backend, keyboard-as-controller, skip intro, mute. Legacy DirectInput pads are under Advanced — leave that off unless you need it, as it adds input lag.
Paths	The game exe and data folder, both detected automatically, with Browse if you have moved them.

Internal resolution and the per-axis render scales only take effect after the game restarts.

The console launcher does the same job without a window:

DOA4Launcher-tui --list              every setting, with an explanation
DOA4Launcher-tui --preset Balanced   apply a graphics preset
DOA4Launcher-tui --set skip_intro=false resolution_scale=3
DOA4Launcher-tui --launch            launch with the saved settings

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If something goes wrong

• The build failed. Open compiler.log next to the exe; the actual compiler error is at the end. The launcher's error box shows the same lines, just fewer of them.
• "This folder's path contains a ^". Move the folder. See step 2.
• The Build Tools keep showing as missing. Install "Desktop development with C++"; the Build Tools edition is enough, you do not need full Visual Studio.
• CMake cannot find Ninja. Ninja usually ships inside Visual Studio rather than on your PATH. The compiler finds it there by itself — but if you run cmake by hand, add Ninja's folder to PATH first.
• CAS or FSR do nothing. They need FidelityFX, which cannot be built under a non-ASCII path. compiler.log says so when that happens.
• The game will not start. Check the newest file in the logs\ folder next to the game exe. The launcher will not let you press Launch until it can see both the executable and the game data.

Still stuck? Open an issue with compiler.log attached.

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Building from source

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/lmaogoodcodenotreally/DOA4-recomp.git
cd DOA4-recomp

The build needs generated code, which comes from your own dump, so run codegen before CMake:

:: stage your dump where the manifest expects it
mkdir assets\game
copy <your>\default.xex assets\game\doa4.xex

:: build the SDK's codegen tool, then run it
cmake -S thirdparty\rexglue-sdk -B out\sdk -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ^
      -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ -DREXGLUE_BUILD_TESTS=OFF ^
      "-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-march=x86-64-v3" "-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-march=x86-64-v3"
cmake --build out\sdk --target rexglue
out\sdk\rexgluerd.exe codegen ./doa4retail_manifest.toml

:: now the game
cmake --preset win-amd64-relwithdebinfo-lean
cmake --build --preset win-amd64-relwithdebinfo-lean

compiler.exe simply does all of the above for you.

Presets:

• win-amd64-relwithdebinfo-lean — the play build. DOA4_LEAN=1 compiles out the project's debug tooling; Tracy and perf counters off, FidelityFX on.
• win-amd64-relwithdebinfo — the dev build, keeping the F5/F6 debug tab, the state poller and the draw probe. See docs/debug.md.

The launcher and compiler are plain Rust and need no game data:

cargo test  --manifest-path rust\compiler\Cargo.toml
cargo test  --manifest-path rust\launcher\Cargo.toml
cargo build --release --manifest-path rust\compiler\Cargo.toml
cargo build --release --manifest-path rust\launcher\Cargo.toml

Package a release zip (needs a built rexgluerd.exe):

powershell -File tools\package_release.ps1 -SdkBin out\sdk\sdk-bin

The zip vendors the FidelityFX SDK so players do not each have to git clone ~700 MB during configure. The script picks up the copy CMake's FetchContent already populated; pass -FfxSource <dir> to point it elsewhere, or -FfxSource "" to leave it out. CMakeLists.txt sets FETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_FIDELITYFX automatically when a vendored copy is present.

REXSDK_DIR defaults to the vendored submodule; pass -DREXSDK_DIR=<path> to build against an SDK checkout elsewhere.

Docs: architecture · hooks · debug · contributing

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Legal

A fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders of Dead or Alive 4, Team Ninja, Koei Tecmo or Microsoft.

No game assets, no decompiled game code and no copyrighted text are distributed here — only the original hooks, launcher and compiler written for this project, plus function addresses and sizes in doa4retail_manifest.toml. You must dump your own copy; compiler.exe only ever reads the dump you hand it, and never downloads anything.

Our code is BSD-3-Clause (LICENSE). Third-party components keep their own licences — see thirdparty/NOTICE.md.